On February 6, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California sided with the Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) and plaintiffs Institute for Fisheries Resources, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, and the Yurok Tribe, in holding that an order governing Reclamation’s operation of Upper Klamath Lake (UKL) from the Oregon Water Resources Department (OWRD) is preempted by the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The order, issued in the midst of a recent drought to meet the needs of irrigators, mandated Reclamation to “immediately preclude or ...
Last week, a decision out of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California restored Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections for the gray wolf (Canis lupus) across most of the contiguous United States.
In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) issued a final rule removing federal protections for the last two remaining gray wolf entities listed as threatened or endangered under the ESA. The final rule asserted delisting was warranted because neither the Minnesota entity nor the 44-state entity qualified as a species, subspecies, or distinct population ...
On September 23, 2014, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia invalidated the final rule issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) delisting the Wyoming Gray Wolf distinct population segment from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Species, concluding that Wyoming's regulatory protections were unenforceable and therefore inadequate for purposes of delisting the species. Despite this conclusion, the court still affirmed the Service's finding that the species has "recovered" and that it was not "endangered or threatened within a ...
Nossaman’s Endangered Species Law & Policy blog focuses on news, events, and policies affecting endangered species issues in California and throughout the United States. Topics include listing and critical habitat decisions, conservation and recovery planning, inter-agency consultation, and related developments in law, policy, and science. We also inform readers about regulatory and legislative developments, as well as key court decisions.
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